Archives for April 2011

A friend of mine asked if I’d do a devotional at a weekly mens breakfast they call Dawn Patrol last week when I was in Nor Cal. I’m teaching at their mens retreat next month, and he asked if I’d come answer a few questions about my life and faith and share a few thoughts too. I said sure.

I, like everyone I know, have tons of e-mail to deal with.  Additionally, I’ve seen several people recently ask on twitter and such for tips or ideas from others on how to deal with the dreaded stuff.  I’m not pro, but if you’re swamped by your inbox, here’s what I do to manage mine.

USE ONE MAIL PROGRAM.  I use a mac so I have all my mail accessed from one program- apple mail.  It’s native to mac and integrates well with my phone and my dot me account.

BUT USE MULTIPLE E-MAIL ACCOUNTS.  While I use only one program to manage my email, I have multiple inboxes that feed it.  First off, I separate my life by e-mail addresses from the beginning by using multiple e-mail accounts.

• EMAIL #1: work e-mail.  I send anything related to ministry through this e-mail.
• EMAIL #2: youth group e-mail.  I use this e-mail as the reply e-mail on retreat flyers and promotional products.  It’s also the e-mail listed on websites for student ministry stuff. 
• EMAIL #3: family e-mail. This is an e-mail address that both my wife and I get.  It is our family e-mail and it’s what we use for mailing lists we want to subscribe to, family or friends, and if the school or some club needs to send us info.
• EMAIL #4: private e-mail. This is an e-mail I never really send much from.  Mostly I use this e-mail as the place where all my twitter, facebook, and blog comments go so that I can manage them easily or ignore them and not have them clog up other areas of my life.  I also like hearing about this stuff when it happens, so this is the only e-mail I have that feeds to my phone.  

APPLY AUTO FILTER OR RULES. If you’re on my staff or someone who regularly sends me e-mail, I have your e-mail filtered to a folder in my mail program before I even touch it.  To do this, I have created “rules” within my mail preferences and whenever mail is from certain people, it automatically is moved to a folder with their name on it.  This allows me to do two things:  #1. manage my inbox inflow better.  #2. find things from key people without using the search window to go hunting.

I hate that I’m writing this today.  I really wish I was not.  Even writing it a few weeks from now would feel better than today.  I even debated not posting this at all because I’m not sure how open I want to be with the world on this, but I felt I needed to.

So instead of praise and rejoicing, the post I put on this blog yesterday is now being followed by a “today, our community lost a fellow youth pastor” post.

I really wish this was about how God answered the prayers of hundreds of people in my community in a way we were asking. But tonight there’s a 22 year old wife holding her 8 week old daughter today wondering why God let their husband/daddy leave this earth.  I can’t imagine how that must feel.  In my heart, I know Mike’s experiencing more joy and peace with Jesus than myself or his grieving wife and family.  But I still hurt.  I hurt for Mike’s daughter, his wife, his family, his church, and the students in his ministry.

As a result, I’m left with a “what now?” moment.  I don’t believe in “unanswered prayers”.  I believe that God is working and has answered prayer, just not in the way that I was praying!  But the miracle I was asking for did not come today.  So, I was left to ponder for the last 12 hours, “how do I deal with unanswered prayer?”

Here’s how I’m dealing with it.  I don’t know that it’s right, it’s just me verbally processing.

MOURN.   I’m choosing to mourn with those who mourn today.  I’m hurting for those who were closest to Mike and who prayed fervently with me for a miracle.

TRUST.  I’m trusting that while I don’t understand, God knows better than I what is needed in this situation.  I’m trusting that how I feel is somehow skewed by perspective and realm.  I’m praying that God gives all of us a peace that surpasses understanding.

LEARN.  I’m asking God for wisdom. I’m really hoping and praying that God continues to show me greater understanding about prayer, God’s will, and our lives.  When I lack wisdom, the scriptures call me to ask God for it.  So i’m trying to be faithful to that call.  I truly want my faith and my understanding to increase, and in the midst of moments like this, both are stretched to the breaking point.

ENDURE.  Whenever I don’t experience what I’m praying for, there’s a little piece of me that wants to stop asking or praying with belief.  But I’m choosing to lean into God for more faith, especially when mine is strained and seems unreasonable. 

I think prayer is powerful.  Jesus said it can move mountains, heal the sick, and transform a soul.  But if I look at most of my prayers, they don’t usually reflect this power.  It’s like using a ferrari to get groceries or a professional kitchen cooktop to heat water. It’s not like you’d be using it wrong, it’s just that you wouldn’t be even close to tapping the potential within.  I even wonder if God gets bored with requests that don’t require much spiritual umph.

On the massive umph needed side, I have a friend in our local youth ministry network who is in the midst of a miracle only kinda moment.  He is the youth pastor at East Valley Christian Fellowship and about a week ago he was enjoying his hobby of bee keeping with his father-in-law when he was stung on the head.  He’s been stung countless times before, but this time something had changed in his body and he went into anaphylactic shock.  He was rushed to the hospital and I’ve been told “died” numerous times on the emergency room table.

His name is Mike Hendricks and this is him with his wife and baby who is now 8 weeks old.  He is currently in ICU, kept alive by machines, and has been in a coma ever since. We’re praying for a full recovery, but for that, what we need is a God-sized miracle.

So, to this end, here’s what I’m trying to do in my prayers for Mike and others.

CHOOSE BELIEF OVER DOUBT.  I’m choosing to believe God can and wants to heal.  Until God tells me otherwise, I’m going to ask God to do what I believe God can do for my friend and co-worker.

DON’T ASK GOD TO DO WHAT I CAN DO MYSELF.  I’m not asking God to go get meals for family members or provide clean clothes for Mike’s daughter. I’m asking God to do what no one, not even the doctors know how to do, and that is heal.

WHEN MY EXPERIENCE HURTS MY FAITH, I LEAN ON THE EXPERIENCE OF OTHERS.  I could give you a hundred reasons why treating God like a genie in a bottle has not worked for me.  I’m not suggesting that this ever works, but hospitals all around the world are filled with the “unexplainable” healing.  Ask any doctor, and they’ll tell you, “Unexplainable stuff happens”.  Maybe I’ve experienced a miracle or two, but when my faith waivers, I lean on the reports of miracles of others, especially of those in the Scriptures.

PLEASE JOIN ME… AND FERVENTLY PRAY THAT GOD HEALS MIKE BY THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT AND IN THE NAME OF JESUS WITH ME. 

Jesus was once asked “What is the greatest commandment?”

He famously responded by quoting the most central text of judaism, the “shema”, and said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

But then he boldly added to it a not-so-famous quotation from Leviticus and said, “And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.”

For years, I thought of loving your neighbor as yourself as very logical.  Surely, we are all selfish and will look out for number one on some level.  Even the most selfless of us, are selfish about some things.  It is therefore logical to conclude that if I could simply love God first, and then love others like I love myself, the world would be a brighter place.

But for the first time in my life, I had this kinda “aha” moment when I realized that if I don’t “love myself” in healthy ways, I cease to be a good model for how to love others.  I break this second commandment by Jesus by breaking the foundation clause of this sentence.  When I’m not loving myself right, I can’t love others right.

In the most extreme cases, it would be like asking someone who is cutting themselves, to love others like they love themselves.  This would be a ridiculous premise. Or if someone is constantly looking in the mirror and telling themselves how ugly they are or jealously measuring their life against the life of everyone around them.  In those cases, loving others like I love myself would be abusive and damaging.  In that case, I would actually need to learn to love myself in some healthy ways before I could love others out of the overflow of that.

For me, I had to confess, that while i’m not cutting, I’m not really very good at loving myself in the way I want to love others. I’m not claiming to be selfless, but rather a little jacked up here.  For example:

• I will deprive myself of sleep to “help others”
• I will say no to a planned exercise run to say yes to an “emergency” counseling need.
• I will ditch a day of doing nothing to help someone who asks.
• I will interrupt solitude to help someone who needs “just a quick thing”
• I will do a lot of things to myself I would never ever ask someone else to do to themselves.

So along with a rule of life and rest, I’m also trying to cultivate the spiritual discipline of self-care: loving myself as I want to be loved by others, so when I love others, I actually have some basis from which to do this.  That seems crazy to me.  But I’m starting to realize its essential really.